Slashdot Log In
Emergence
from the arise-ye-ants dept.
The author makes a point that there are 3 main camps of scientific study.
- The study of simple systems - under a few dozen variables, like electromagnetism, or celestial mechanics.
- The study of stochastic systems - few million to few billion variables, like actuarial sciences and genetics.
- The study of disorganized complexity. Systems in the middle between a dozen and a few million variables, where the second order characteristics - how they interact, is of primary concern.
Deduction and induction work for the first two camps, but for the third, the interactions cause actions and reactions which are what scientists politely call counter intuitive, meaning your first thought is Huh? Or, in other words, it behaves quite differently from what your instincts and (so-called) common sense would tell you.
There are five basic principles for developing a system (or simulation of one) which can express emergent behavior:
- More is different. You get a very different behavior of the system when certain thresholds are reached.
- Ignorance is useful. Ants communicate with a vocabulary of around 20 words/ideas.
- Encourage random encounters. Much of the behavior of an ant colony comes from them just bumping into each other (or external things like food, or my foot).
- Look for patterns in the signs. Even with the limited vocabulary of ants, they can also express things based on the decay in the pheromones they deposit.
- Pay attention to your neighbors. Also described as "local information can lead to global wisdom."
One of the enduring myths we have, is that of the Ant Queen. The myth supposes that there is some central planning done in an ant colony. Instead, the queen exists only to pop eggs out. Male ants have such short lives, that in most species of ants, they have no mouths to eat with; they just don't live long enough to get hungry. The production of warriors and workers is stimulated by pheromones in the colony. Information on where to gather food is gathered through random acts of bumping into things. There is no ant which tells another to go lift that bale or tote that barge. It appears that our intelligence is a by-product of the neural interactions of our brains.
The economist Jane Jacobs had been studying things like this for years, and has been demonized by the majority of economists: they want to believe in some centralized controlling force, control that force, and you control the development of your economic system. People reading her books tend to think she worships sidewalks, instead, she values the communication that can only happen on sidewalks; people meeting each other and exchanging words. You can't say "hi" to your neighbors if you are each zipping past each other on the freeway.
One can experiment with emergent behavior with some software tools. The author explains a few, of which you are most likely to have experience with SimCity.
The main difference between chaos theory and emergent behavior theory lies in a couple important differences. A chaotic system has a number of determinable feedback loops, all of which are (usually critically) dependent upon the starting conditions. Emergent behavior has more to do with feedback loops causing totally different behavior, and when some threshold (usually population) is passed, the nature of the system drastically changes.
If you are looking for sample code to simulate things, you won't find it in this book. If, however, you want to get an overview of where this field is coming from, read this book.
You can purchase Emergence: the Connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Slashdot example (Score:3, Funny)
Cellular Automata != Wolfram (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cellular Automata != Wolfram (Score:2)
Re:Have you even read the book? (Score:3, Informative)
That's just in the first chapter, but it continues throughout. He makes little reference to others' work in the field, pretty much dismissing all work
Higher order behavior (Score:4, Funny)
Well, not quite sure if it can explain as high order behavior as Wolfram yet...
/. in the book (Score:5, Interesting)
Author seems to think taco is a genius or something, but it's still a good read
John.
Re:/. in the book (Score:2, Funny)
Ooohhh yes I do matey, I played Baldurs Gate all the way through I'll have you know.
ugh (Score:2, Informative)
This is as much about philosophy than science... (Score:3, Interesting)
Philosophy, semantics, yadda yadda (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me that emergent properties is what it's about. I've got to concede Dijkstra's point.
Slashdot Hive Mind: Emergence! (Score:4, Funny)
I knew our collective hive mind would come in handy someday:
1. "I, for one, welcome our emergent overlords."
2. "???"
3. "Profit!"
4. "In Soviet Russia, our groupthink comes from emergent behvaior, or is it the other way around?"
5. "Who cares? Look, it's Natalie Portman!"
6. "Does Netcraft confirm it?"
7. "Yeah, but only in Korea."
8. "Netcraft does not confirm it. Old people are not quite dead yet."
9. "OK, that's the Monty Python reference out of the way. Has someone bashed China yet?"
10. "No, and we also haven't bashed Micro$oft yet, at least not until this line.
Crap. I'm only at #10 and the well's running dry. (What, you want me to yell "MEEPT!" or something?)
If you're a glass-half-empty type: we won't be as useful in the underground sugar mines as I'd previously thought. We're only capable of half as many thoughts.
If you're a glass-half-full type: or maybe we've achieved antlike emergent behavior using only ten words and ideas, making us twice as efficient as our formic emergent-behavior-exhibiting overlords!
Re:Slashdot Hive Mind: Emergence! (Score:2)
This only goes to show what many have already suspected: the average
John.
Pray (Score:2)
I know a lot of people here seems to despise Crichton but, IMHO, he writes book that are really fun (and much better than the movies they span).. so I encourage everyone to give them a try.
btw, if you like Prey you should read Andromeda Strain [crichton-official.com], also...
--krahd
mod me up, Scottie!
Re:Pray (Score:2)
Re:Pray (Score:2)
His basic theme doesn't change much: advanced technology and hubris gets us into trouble that only Mother Nature, in her serendipitous magnanimity, can rescue us from. Like Andromeda Strain
Re:Pray (Score:2)
I thought the book (Score:2)
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Santschii (Score:2, Informative)
I guess I'll have to read the book to be sure, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I guess I'll have to read the book to be sure, (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly what I was thinking. I may have to read this book just for that comparison alone. For those who have not read it, I highly recommend it...it's not a weekend browser, but has some fascinating insight and thought experimentation. One of the most interesting books I've ever read. And the kind of books I usually like have more pictures than words
Re:I guess I'll have to read the book to be sure, (Score:2, Insightful)
Contracrostipunctus
Acrostically
Spells
J.S.BACH
Very much in the same vein... (Score:2)
It's a bit dated, since complexity theory and emergence are actually not all that new. People familiar with cellular automata modeling and games like SimCity will chuckle.
But the book is fascinating, has great explanations of many of the concepts, and touches on many of the people who have made the study of complexity so fascinating. I'd definitely recommend it for a geek holiday gift.
Re:Very much in the same vein... (Score:2)
Psychohistory (fictional) emerging? (Score:2)
BTW has anybody else noticed the analogies between Asimov's original Foundation series and the adoption of Open Source/Free Licensed Software. We are about heading towards the second Stallman [stallman.org] crises : The Merchant Princes.
opps, should be "third chapter of Foundation" (Score:2)
Re:Psychohistory (fictional) emerging? (Score:2, Funny)
Matrix (Score:3, Interesting)
threat modeling for web applications (Score:2, Informative)
Gestalt (Score:2)
I did some work with this stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)
The essential concept is that each individual is a simple agent that operates autonomously, and makes very few very simple decisions as it goes about its work. The behaviour of one individual is unremarkable, but the behaviour that emerges from a large group of the same individuals is really quite amazing.
Because the concepts are really quite logically simple, this stuff is really simple to program too. Just fire up perl or java or any language that has a similar capability to OO concepts, write a simple object - your agent - that behaves according to a simple set of rules and responds in defined ways to certain stimuli. Make a wrapper program to create the playing field, instantiate as many 'agents' as you see fit, and let them loose. Tweak, rinse, repeat.
As an aside, when I was writing a simulation to emulate the behaviour of ants foraging (more to prove that perl and java were suitable languages for the task than to demonstrate anything new with ants per se), I went off and RTFM'ed quite a bit on ants. They're very interesting little critters in their own right. I picked the eyes out of the various behaviours of a bunch of different species of ants to come up with one that made a fun simulation (refer references below).
The bare mechanical simplicity with which some of these critters operate is really quite amazing. Take, for example, the concept of trail laying. I guess it's pretty widely known that many species of ants lay trails from food sources back to the nest to guide other ants to the food. (Try: find a line of ants climbing up the wall in the kitchen or somewhere, moisten your finger, wipe straight through the line (washing off the trail). They'll be all disoriented for a little while, but they'll quickly re-establish the trail, largely by random search). Anyhoo, what's really quite cool is how one species does it. The trail is just an emission from the back end of the ant that wipes along the ground as it walks. The mechanics are such that if the ant has a full crop, it puts pressure on the digestive tract, and forces stuff out the back. If its only lightly fed, it only forces a bit out the back, if its had a big feed, it forces a lot out the back and lays a denser trail. The outcome is that the ants lay stronger trails to the better food sources. Elegant, isn't it!
I could go on forever, but I won't. Some references below. Another behaviour that is probably even more interesting than trail laying is navigation. They're absolutely amazing. Various ants use various combinations of reference to the sun, counting the amount of ground that passes underneath them as they walk *AND* remembering turns!!!, and reference to major landmarks as they travel. Did I say amazing?
Anyhoo, here's a bunch of references on ant behaviour if anyone's interesting.
Re:I did some work with this stuff... (Score:2)
>
Um...
Get out more...
Please...
Re:I did some work with this stuff... (Score:3, Informative)
Better yet, use a simulation environment like breve [spiderland.org] and you get 3d rendering, collision detection, basic physics, and a lot more for free.
Re:I did some work with this stuff... (Score:3, Interesting)
We did look at a bunch of those tools. An argument that I was trying to make, and trying to demonstrate, was that many common-or-garden programming languages - perl, java et al - are perfectly suitable tools for this type of work. There are a lot of simulation environments around, and they all have their quirks, their own languages, and stuff. What I wanted to demonstra
try reading goodwin, watching 'Sacred Balance' (Score:2)
observations
Theres some interesting observational research, Oscillations and Chaos in Ant Societies, R.V. Sole, O. Miramontes, and B.C. Goodwin, J. Theor. Biol. 161, pp.343-357, 1993.
In David Suzuki's, The Sacred Balance [sacredbalance.com], Brian Goodwin (author also of, HOW THE LEOPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS [amazon.com]) made some interesting observational discoveries with ants. Synchronous emergent behaviour arose when individual *chaotic* ants reached a certain density. Goodwin concluded that ...
Ignorance is useful. (Score:2)
If that were true, my company would be the most productive on the planet.
Is Christmas vacation here yet? :-\
Interesting ideas (Score:2, Insightful)
Can you say that the atomic level CAUSES the macroscopic level, i.e. one level emerges out of the other? My feeling is, it doesn't make much of a difference. The interactions you get depend upon yo
After Thought (Score:2, Informative)
Modern applications (Score:2)
Good ref for Emergentism in philosophy (Score:3, Informative)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emer
Good Economists and Bad Economists (Score:2)
Of course a lot of socialist economists get the press, because there are so many liberal leftists in academia.
Why people who believe in evolution and not in creationism yet don't believe in the emergent free market but instead believe in central socialist planning is beyo
Locusts, Teens and Mobs (Score:2)
It would be really interesting to try to study and correlate some apparently phenomona in animal behavior and sociology.
For example, swarming of locusts is one such phenomenon. It does not happen every year. It does not happen everywhere. Yet, when it happens it takes the shape of enormous disasters, such as what has been happening in Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Even Cyprus and the Canary Islands are affected!
Also, look at how some teens hanging out or at a bar would be under peer pressure an
Re:Prey (Score:5, Interesting)
Swarming/flocking/schooling algorithms are a great example of this. All it takes is a desire to be close to your neighbors but not too close, and the swarm/flock/school functions largely on its own - it can even go around obstacles and re-merge, it optimizes into aerodynamic shapes, etc.
I love complexity from simplicity. One of my favorites occurs from the standard predator/prey population equation. If you run it for a while, it switches into repeating cycles of population size. However, the positions and numbers of cycles are dependant on the equation conditions. If you plot the cycles vs. the starting conditions, you get this beautiful graph of the data starting at a single point, then branching, and again, faster and faster until it forms into pure chaos... and then from the chaos, emerges three clean branches, which then fall to chaos again.
Parent
Crichton (Score:2)
Re:6Day creationists and Flat earthers need not re (Score:2)
Re:Orson Scott Card (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Orson Scott Card (Score:2)
Possible? Everything is. But who needs it when the things we can detect seem to run the gamut? See the original formulation of Occam's Razor.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:This is nothing new (Score:2)
Xmas of what year? The book was published in 2001.
Larry
Re:Emergence & Hidden Order (Score:2)
Kelly told more of the people story (Score:2)
Wolfram's reunification of his own old Class 3 and Class 4 under his more recent Principle of Computational Equivalence goes even further in a direction I'd rather see us retreat [meme.com.au] from.
I actually read the book by Johnson reviewed here for con